Blade Runner And Filmmaking

Roy Batty - I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.

This is one of my all time favorite films. Here is a little history about me. We used to live in Missouri and we had a small video rental place. This was around the explosion point of the VCR, about 1980. So I was into movies at the ripe old age of ten since I had more of them to watch than anyone else in school and one of the only kids to have a VCR at home.

Ok fast forward to moving to close to where I currently live. The first town we lived in when we moved to this state. I had a class of about fifteen people from a class of around a hundred. Simply put I did not fit in. They had been together their entire lives. Nope, I didn't fit in at all and they let me know about it every day. The next town we lived in I went through high school and loved it. There was a bigger class, friendlier people, I still keep in contact with a few of my classmates and wish I could locate a few more!

Anyway that is beside the point and just a nuance to the story. Suffice it to say it was about 1983 -1984 now. My mom worked in the big town around here at Southwestern Bell and had a lot of friends in town who copied movies for each other. Well that Summer we got Blade Runner. I had never seen anything like it. I was of course happy that Han Solo was in it.

It was a lot different than Star Wars, it was dark, rainy, gritty. There was a sense of doom and a future that was as far away from Roddenberry's future as you could get. You could describe this movie as claustrophobic, not like Alien but close. There was no hope in this future where even the animals are machines and the Sun rarely shines but shadows are everywhere. Neon, night, and violence.

This is a future you want no part of. I was pretty unhappy there and this appealed to me.

You have Han Solo doing his best Bogart imitation as Rick Deckard in a world that is a cross between a Raymond Chandler novel and scifi novel. A Blade Runner who caps rogue replicants. A story about humanity and what it means to be really human. About mortality and finding inner peace.

I watched the US theatrical version of Blade Runner at least thirty times that Summer. To me that was the only version there was until much later when I learned about Ridley Scott not being happy with that version and that was the one that the studio forced him to put out. It had the Harrison Ford narration and the happy ending. There was no unicorn dream sequence. That was the version I fell in love with.

So last night I watched the four disc set that came out. I wanted to purchase the five disc set but I'm waiting until I get a HD DVD player, a Blu Ray player, and a HDTV to get it.

This movie is a major reason I love film, why I enjoy making them and that is the history of me and this film.